I got back most of the images that were previously placed in a photo agency. So the missing wallpapers are back, and I just published no less than 4 other CDs of images for sale.

June 2004

Moved to Briançon in the heart of the Alps where I'm starting a software and consulting business: Briansoft

July 2004

The Euro being too expensive with respect to the US$, blah, blah, blah, I just jacked up the price of the Photo Archive CDs. Sorry. But fear not, you can still purchase them at the same old cheap price if you get the bran new DVD compilation.

Aug 2004

Updating the inner workings of my site to PHP. If you notice some bugs, incompatibilities or missing pages/links, please let me know.

As part of the return-to-Antarctica trip (below), I scanned old slides of Dome C in 1977, sent to me by Thierry Cappelle.

November 30th, 2004

I'm back in Antarctica for the fifth time, but this is a First: the first winter-over at the new franco-italian research station of Concordia, on the High Antarctic Plateau. Forecast is: 4 months of total darkness, winter temperature down to -84°C and total isolation for 10 months. Should be fun. I started a blog of the expedition.

February 10th, 2005

The winter-over itself started with the departure of the last airplane, we are now on our own till november.

On the 1st I leave Dome C for a coastal station where I hitch a ride on a C-130, destination New-Zealand for a well deserved vacation after residing for exactly one year in Antarctica. On the 4th, at 4am, after 369 days in Antarctica I'm back in a world where white is no longer the dominant color. It may be a while before my next update !

February 27th 2006

Back home, finally after 15 months... to a flooded apartment ! I'll do some updates (epilogue to the winterover, NZ, OZ...) after we settle down and I go through 150 boxes of slides...

Counting the 10 millionth hit today; and in 2 weeks my site will be just 10 years old. Also an evil friend managed to convince me to add something I usually hate: commercial advertisement. But fear not, it's only in text mode and without popups or flashing graphics. So if you want to help out my site, don't hesitate to click on relevant ads.

March 21st

A page with the december New Zealand 'return to climbing' (including a 54-hour non-stop epic on the north ridge of Sefton) and the ensuing month of hot climbing in Australia. There are some other minor new pages and site reorganization (what, a 200Kb page of text is too slow ?!?).

May 6th

After a work conference in Rome I'm taking time reorganizing my picture collection. Fished out old pics of Apennines in central Italy. And added new pics of backcountry skiing around Briançon where we currently live.

Doing all this work on many sources of digital and film images, I had to rationalize my workflows, so I put my notes online. While I was at it I detailed various image combination processes, with examples. Also wrote a quick hack to produce 360° bird's eye images after an idea for a photography contest.

After last week's mayhem, I translated 4 pages from a prophetic comic strip of the '60s about airports in the 2000s.

September 1st

A few days in the only (?) crack climbing area of Europe, the Val d'Orco, in Italy.

September 28th

Two new CDs of royalty-free images are out, featuring pictures of the Concordia winterover as well as the latest climbing in Australia, New Zealand and the Alps.

Also added a slide show of the best wallpapers and finally found a workaround to a jpg transparency bug that'd stumped me for years.

November

Weather getting colder at home but no sign of snow yet, so we are off to a few days of climbing in warmer Corsica, in between trips to find a new place.

January 2007

Pour le 1er Janvier 2007

Between finding a new place, moving, fixing it up, starting a new job and exploring new playgrounds, things have been hectic this month. To say nothing of technical glitches that have kept my site offline for a good week and the counters broken for 3 months. Sorry about that. It's back online now but I still need to do some modifications... while not even having an internet connection at home... C:-(

I would like to pay homage to René Desmaison, french alpinist and a great inspiration when I started climbing. He died yesterday at 77. Over ten years ago while climbing in Peru, after a failed ascent on Chacraraju due to the difficulty, I learned that in the meanwhile he had just opened a new (and even harder) route on the other and more remote side of the mountain. At 65 vs 25, that was humbling.

October

Spent a WE at home, sorting through images and compiled a shortlist with my favorite images.

November

I've modified this lens more than a decade ago, but it usually gathers dust instead of doing 3D pictures or even portraits.

A too short week of vacation in Spain, climbing the impressive Mallos de Riglos.

But unfortunately my telescope fried while viewing the great spanish night sky.

Also a few picture of a visit of the Ganil where unknown matter is created out of the specs of the current universe.

Upon request, the design specs of my custom Camping Kangoo. Cheap and convenient.

I currently have 2 ongoing exhibits of Antarctic pictures: one in Genoa (Italy) Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide, since October 25th. The other at the famed Institut Oceanographique de Monaco, starting february 19th 2008.

Happy New year. Not much news. In bed with the flu during the ice climbing vacation... In case you want to do some late Xmas gifts, here are some new posters out for sale. Grab them while they last, series' limited.

I received an advanced release of the last album from german metal band Megalith, titled 'Storming the summit'. It's brutal and quite good. Official release is on June 20th. Some of my images are on their cover art...

July

I accumulate images, but I'm late in putting them up for all to see. Here are some trial infrared images and a few shots of climbing and canoeing in Ardeche.

Changing house yet again (I think it's the 19th time I move in about 20 years). I also decided to toss the junk accumulated over the years and build all my own furniture, which kept me busy for a while...

I gave up trying to get videos to work on all browsers and OS. Instead I just uploaded to YouTube and embedded the videos. Quality is so bad in most cases that I won't even care if they appropriate them in some way...

Added a page about the Sony Reader for eBooks and a script to convert comic books for it.

My site is now available securely. Not that there's anything to hide on it, but if you have nothing to hide, why are most states so intent on spying everything you do on the 'net ? So everybody should have this installed in Firefox.

Finally some updates: a short WE of climbing granite in Ubaye and a long week of runout slabs in Val di Mello followed by the annual pilgrimage to Gran Sasso, a bunch of new wallpapers and more to come.

September

Images of climbing the photogenic Dibona, 25 years after my last time there.

Some heavy modifications (HTML5, CSS, simplified JS, removed IE specific crap, general spell check) to the underbelly of the site to improve the presentation. I probably broke a lot of things in the process...